Visitor

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It’s been so long since I’ve dated that I can’t remember exactly how. But Claire is a patient teacher. She’s already reminded me how to cry in the company of another, and that’s a big thing to learn. As a boy growing up in Tennessee, you learned never to cry where anyone else could see. Crying was a sign of weakness. When we were kids, tears made the other boys around us brave.

In the army, it was different. You still went off and found a place to cry alone, but you weren’t scared of your brothers and sisters in arms. In the army, tears made everyone else afraid. You didn’t want to spread the weakness. Tears are contagious things.

I saw my father cry once and only once. It wasn’t when I left for war, and it wasn’t when Mom died. It wasn’t when my brother got out of rehab and we both saw that look in his eyes and knew he’d never drink again. It wasn’t when our sister married an officer from Cyphus and we knew we’d be lucky to see her every other holiday. Those were all times when I felt like I might explode, keeping my grief or relief all locked up. Those were times that sent me off to my room, alone, to weep into my palms.

But not my dad. No, the only day I saw him bawl was the day he pushed in the clutch on the old tractor, and the brake lines were dry, and the tractor lurched backward down the hill before he could get it in gear again, and there was just a muffled yip from our dog, who always followed too close to that tractor, and then she was gone.

I never asked Dad why it was that time. This was after Mom was gone, and Shelly was in Cyphus, and Tyrese was clean, and I’d already enlisted and finished boot camp. This was after all of that. But there he was, clutching his dog, who was already old and had lived the kind of long and leisurely life that any dog in the galaxy would dream of, whose coat had grown white and whose eyes had gone rheumy, and who hadn’t suffered a bit—had just gone out doing the happy thing he loved best: following my dad around the property.

I watched my father cry for half an hour. This was two days before I deployed. I came to his side, and I stood there, feeling more shocked and confused than sad. I mean, I loved the dog, but I loved my dad more, and I didn’t know what the hell to do to comfort him. The navy had just taught me how to pull a Star Swift out of a flat spin in atmo and get her back into orbit, but no one had taught me how to put my arm around my bawling father. No one.

I retreated to the porch and watched from there. After a while, I felt angry. He never cried for me like that, not once. Not for Mom. Not for Shelly. Not for Tyrese.

I think I’ve held on to that anger for too long. Never understood what my father was crying about. Not until Claire told me it was okay to let go, and when I did, I found myself crying for everything. And everyone. And even myself a little.

I wish I’d known what my dad was going through that day. I hated him for crying about the wrong things. But I get it now that he was crying for everything. He was crying for me. Crying because I was going off to war. Because the chances were better than even that he’d never see me again.

I guess those dry brake lines broke more than his pup’s back that day. Whatever was still holding my father together snapped as well. I’ve felt that. It’s something deep in the chest that goes. A rupture between the part of us that pulses and the part of us that breathes. To hold that together, you need an embrace from someone who cares. My father needed that embrace. He needed it that day, rather than the perfunctory and chickenshit one I gave him on my day of deployment. The day his pup died was the true day I went off to war. It was the day my father really needed me. And I sat on the porch and was angry at the world.

This is the story of my life, I suppose: always in the right place at the right time, and then I don’t do anything. I stand there. Or I rock back and forth in my grandfather’s chair. Or I go find a place along the trenches where it’s nice and quiet, and I fill that place with hot tears.

So this is the thing I learned from Claire: Crying isn’t simply about opening the floodgates to some private trauma and letting it out—crying is just as much about letting those around you know you’re hurting. Our tears are trying to serve a purpose, but we rarely let them. I don’t know how we got started with subverting that purpose—maybe it starts with bullies in middle school, or parents telling their kids not to cry ’cause it embarrasses them in public—I just know that it takes a bit of courage to unlearn that shame, and to be there for others when they try to unlearn that shame, and that it all gets easier after you feel how healthy it is.

Beacon 1529 fills my lifeboat’s canopy while I muse on these things. I swing to the side and dock up to the magnetic collar that leads to the airlock. It’s a ten out of ten on the pilot-o-meter. When I pop the hatch, Cricket goes bounding inside, looking for Claire, who shouts down from the life support module to come on up. NASA did not build these ladders with boyfriends holding flowers and chocolate and cheese in mind. I climb with my elbows and even employ my chin once or twice. Above me, Cricket’s tail happily thwump-thwumps against the pumps and gensets and machinery that fill the cramped module.

“Honey, I’m home!” I call.

This is something I’ve heard people say in holocoms. Claire laughs every time. Almost like she can imagine the two of us sharing a home together. A normal life. Planetside. As soon as I get my head above the grating, Cricket turns and licks my face. If my warthen can read minds like I think she can, she has to know how much I hate this. And yet she does it anyway. Maybe she hates me. Maybe that’s why she does it.

“No,” I tell her, warding her off with lilies, appledots, butterflaps, and three other alien varietals not listed in the archives. Cricket turns in excited circles while I hand the flowers to Claire. One of the appledots is broken and leans over like it’s given up on life.

“For me?” Claire asks. She wipes the sweat from her brow and takes the flowers, sniffs them, tries to straighten the stricken appledot.

“Yeah, and I don’t think any are toxic,” I say.

She leans in to kiss me. Her lips taste of salt and grease. “They’re beautiful. And your beacon is officially under the worst quarantine in the history of quarantines. Why don’t you take these back to the lifeboat? The last thing I need is mites getting loose in here. Or roaches.”

“The trader said they were clean,” I protest.

Claire shoots me a look. I show her the chocolate and the cheese. The look persists. Like I said, I’m not very good at this whole dating thing.

“Should I put Cricket out the airlock as well?” I ask. “She might have fleas.”

Cricket growls at me. Claire scratches the alien behind the ears and gives me that look I used to see on my CO when he gave orders that he knew contradicted both reason and his last set of orders. “Whatever damage sweet Cricket has done has been done,” she says.

Cricket turns and cocks her head at this, like she can’t imagine ever doing an ounce of damage. I leave them both and put the flowers and the rest of the contraband back in the lifeboat. When I return, Claire is wiping her hands on a rag and putting her tools away. I give her another kiss before heading up to the galley to put dinner together.

Our days are a lot like this, all the little boring bits in the holocoms between the laugh tracks. There’s a lot of anticipation that something is going to happen, something really funny or tragic, but it rarely ever does. It rarely ever does, but you can still feel it coming.